When investigating the unknown, it’s best to leave obtuse hypotheses aside until all the evidence has been gathered. For many mysteries, this quest for truth can take centuries, for some even centuries mark only small intervals in our understanding, and in the midst of it all changes in fashionable intellectualism obscure and unmoor previous investigations.

Our search for answers into the nature of hauntings and apparitions has been a source of interest since the beginning of recorded history, with the familiar arguments of both skeptics and believers changing little over the years. Yet the experiences persist, and evoke the deeper levels of our existence, and the nature of our relationships with each other, with ourselves and even with the passing of time itself. Michael Newton explores some of these nuances in his review of A Natural History of the Ghosts by Roger Clarke:

“What do we fear when we fear ghosts? Certainly, they evoke the possibility of elemental entities hidden in the world, at least mischievous and even malevolent.

I’m sure they are reasonable. But watch out for the hidden fees and subscription-based extras (e.g., “ectoplasm removal”, “ongoing psychic remediation”, etc., etc.). From Alanna Gallagher at The Irish Times:

FIFTY-YEAR-old Patrick McGuire is a banker who grew up in a haunted house in Dublin. As a child he complained to his mother about being kept awake by a presence.

“She saw him quite a few times … a person walking across the hallway,” he explains. “One day we had a house guest who said she was psychic and asked for permission to walk through the house. She said the property had a spirit and that it was protecting the family. She pointed to a formal room that we never used where she indicated that a duel had taken place. During the fight a man had been killed.”

There was never any malice, McGuire says, it was just a fact of life in the home he grew up in.